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    • 29 September 2009

      Industrial Ph.D. Students Heading for Berkeley

      The two industrial PhD students, Martin Wrå Nielsen and Jakob Strømann-Andersen, employed by Henning Larsen Architects and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), will be going to the University of California, Berkeley.

    • The exchange stay at Berkeley makes part of the Ph.D. students’ education programme. The Ph.D. students conduct research on sustainable building and will at Berkeley be attached to the Center for the Built Environment (CBE), Department of Architecture.

      ”We have chosen Berkeley because it is one of the universities in the world where the interface between architecture and building geometry is really explored and where state-of-the-art knowledge in an energy-efficient building is developed”, explains Martin Wrå Nielsen, a civil engineer specializing in the energy-efficiency of the building envelope.

      Jakob Strømann-Andersen has focused on urban planning and together with the company’s third PhD student, Michael Jørgensen, who focuses on the individual building, they each cover their own area in sustainable building.

      ”At Henning Larsen, we get a unique chance to practice what you might call ”applied pure science” and we integrate this knowledge directly in the projects. In addition, we use the company as a laboratory in our research, which makes it more in touch with reality”, tells Martin Wrå Nielsen.

      For Henning Larsen, the research-based approach has made it possible to be first with a number of specific, sustainable building solutions. The energy calculations and technical know-how of the Ph.D. students are implemented at an early stage in the projects and the integrated design method helps support the architectural idea all the way through.

      The stay at CBE and the attachment to the world-known Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), also situated at Berkeley Campus, will provide the research project with inputs from some of the world’s leading researchers in the field.

      ”We look forward to bringing home lots of new knowledge”, says Martin Wrå Nielsen, who expects to finish his Ph.D. with a series of articles based on different angles of the case studies at Henning Larsen Architects.

      The research project is supported by Realdania.